Photos Round 2

Long time readers of this website will perhaps remember my previous attempt to add a photo section to this website. I called it an experiment. As such, it failed.
It failed primarily from lack of time. If I had been willing, or able, to take more time to upload random (or selected) photos from my everyday […]

Jacques Barzun on Teaching

A quote on learning, and teaching:
“The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.”
–Jacques Barzun “Reasons to De-Test the Schools,” New York Times (1988-10-11), later published in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)
One can take that observation […]

Banana Polish

Need to polish your shoes? Use a banana peel. They say it works.
http://www.wikihow.com/Polish-Shoes-With-a-Banana
I think it is funny, but I’m not sure I believe a banana peel is really equivalent to shoe polish. Whatever properties a banana peel shares with shoe polish, a banana doesn’t have everything that shoe polish does.
If you give it a try […]

A Coin, A Ring

How to make a ring from a quarter:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Ring-from-a-Silver-Coin
One can get very technical and make rings by smelting metal, pouring it into molds, and all sorts of other highly technical stuff. Which is all very neat, but requires a lot of effort, skill, and tools. The advantage, and coolness, of using a quarter is its simplicity.
I […]

Digital History: Presenting The Past on The Web

A while ago I stumbled across this website:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/
It is a book presented as a website. As they say,
This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the […]

Old Autumn Essay

I had meant to write an essay this autumn titled “Fall Cometh” or something like that. It was to be a descriptive essay about the fall weather, much like I have written essays about the Spring. But I haven’t written it yet. Maybe I will still write it, even though it would be late.
In the […]

Early Autumn, Late Afternoon

[Note: This week I was doing cleanup and going through my old pads of note paper. On one pad, stuck in among some other writing, I found this short descriptive essay. It had no date attached and I can’t recall exactly what year I wrote it. It was probably about four years ago, and I […]